Millianism is the view that, from a semantical viewpoint, proper names simply refer; there is no further semantically relevant function they play. As the case of indexicals makes very clear, most of the considerations in Naming and Necessity that people find plausible are compatible with the falsity of Millianism. Besides, there are good reasons to consider that thesis false. Millians grant tha...

away from certain aspects of a creature's environmental embedding. We can be explanatory pluralists here, and allow that these different notions of content are fitted for different explanatory tasks. The 'narrower' notions fit into broader generalisations, but cannot provide explanations of happenings under more specific descriptions. Now, it is far from obvious that there can be a genuine noti...

Epistemic naturalism holds that the results or methodologies from the cognitive sciences are relevant to epistemology, and some have maintained that scientific methods are more compatible with externalist theories of justification than with internalist theories. But practically all discussions about naturalized epistemology are framed exclusively in terms of cognitive psychology, which is only ...

externalim currently dominating the theory of meaning and content. However, foundational issues such as these remain insuffi ciently explored; because of the role the shared environment plays in radical interpretation, Davidson thought of himself as a social and physical externalist, though clearly not of the mainstream kind (cf. 2001 ) . So long as a systematic comparison of these competing ac...

The traditional debate over skepticism has largely presupposed the framework of foundationalism. With the rise of the intemalism/externalism debate in epistemology, however, it is apparent that there are radically different ways to understand foundational justification. In this chapter we begin by examining the traditional epistemic regress argument for foundationalism. Before presenting what I...

In the debate around the extended mind, the special alliance that the extended thesis often has with functionalism usually plays in favor of the former, with functionalism providing support for the extended thesis. Here I want to consider this alliance in the opposite direction: does the extended thesis provide support for functionalism by promoting the need of a level of explanation that is in...

Externalism about some mental property, M, is the thesis that whether a person (or other physical being) has M depends, not only on conditions inside the person’s skin, but also on the person’s environment and the way that the person is embedded in that environment. The dependence here is supposed to be conceptual rather than causal; it is the kind of dependence that can be revealed by philosop...

Vagueness has always been a problem for philosophers. This is true in a number of ways. One obvious way is that the vagueness inherent in much philosophical discourse has always lead to problems in the interpretation and criticism of philosophical arguments. This is a way in which the vagueness of language causes problems for philosophers. (We can call this “the practical problem of vagueness.”...